


Questions

by Servena



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Anger, Best Friends, Developing Friendships, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Looking for Someone, Mild Angst, Mild Blood, Questions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-26 05:26:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17739851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Servena/pseuds/Servena
Summary: “Why do you keep asking me? There’s a dozen other guys in this company who know where he is!”





	Questions

The first few times Babe doesn’t even really notice. Whenever someone comes up to him to ask about Eugene, he just points them in the vague direction he has last seen him running off to, and they leave him alone. It takes a particularly bad night with constant shelling and sub-zero temperatures before it finally gets on his nerves. When Liebgott nudges his arm with his boot to wake him up the next morning only for him to ask “Hey Babe, you seen the Doc?” he almost takes his head off.

“Why do you keep asking me?” he explodes, causing Liebgott to actually take a step back in surprise. “There’s a dozen other guys in this company who know where he is!”

Liebgott, of course, is having none of that. “You’re the one sharing a foxhole with him, idiot!” he snaps back. “Now you gonna tell me or do I have to keep looking?”

That makes sense even to Babe’s sleep-deprived brain, and now that he’s actually awake he can also see the blood running down Liebgott’s fingers from a cut in his hand, so he lets it go. “I think he went to check up on Toye”, he says instead, struggling to remember what Eugene had told him when he had left the foxhole with the sun barely peeking above the horizon.

“Thanks”, Liebgott says with a voice that sounds anything but grateful, and walks off.

Babe sighs and pulls up his jacket to keep the cold from creeping into his collar. He guesses that he is the person who best knows Gene’s location (except for the man himself) since they’ve been sharing the foxhole ever since – ever since that thing happened that he really doesn’t want to think about. So he really shouldn’t take it personally.

However, the questions don’t cease after they have left the Bois Jacques to make their way across the rest of Belgium. On the contrary, every guy in the company now seems to turn to him when they’re searching for their medic. By now he’s gotten so used to it that he answers them before they’ve even finished talking.

Webster approaches him one afternoon in one of those small towns with a too long French name as he’s sitting in front of a building to clean his rifle. “Hey Babe, do you know –“, he begins.

“He’s upstairs checking on Malarkey”, Babe says without even looking up.

Webster thanks him and turns to leave. Only then does Babe glance up to watch him disappear through the door, and he sighs loudly. “Hey, when did I become the Doc location service?” he complains to no one in particular.

Perconte looks up from the game of cards he’s sharing with Luz. “Well, you’re the guy’s best friend, of course we’re asking you!”

Babe almost lets go of his rifle in surprise. “I am?”

Perconte just shares a look with Luz like he just failed a math test for elementary school kids, and shakes his head while Luz grins. But neither of them wants to say anything else even when Babe pries, so he turns back to his rifle to puzzle over it instead.

It isn’t that he doesn’t consider Gene his friend, in that vague, never-talked-about way. He enjoys his company, especially after J - after that thing he doesn’t wanna think about happened, and it seems to him that the same is true for Gene. Still, he didn’t think they were best friends. A best friend to Babe has always been someone like Bill, someone to joke around with and drink lots of beer.  But then Gene isn’t anything like that, so he supposes it would be different with him. And it isn’t like Gene has a lot of friends in the company either, in fact now that Babe thinks about it, he can’t come up with a single one.

In the end he decides to take the bull by the horns because that much thinking makes his head hurt and his rifle couldn’t possibly get any cleaner. So when they’re sitting next to each other in the evening a few feet away from the rest of the guys to eat something that could, with a lot of good will, be classified as stew, he puts his spoon away to ask: “Hey Gene, are we friends?”

Eugene looks up from his bowl and frowns at him. “I s’pose so”, he says slowly, with that heavy Cajun accent of his.

“Best friends?” Babe continues. It feels weird to bring it up like that, but Gene is a hard guy to read and he really wants to know where he’s standing.

Gene doesn’t answer immediately though, and just as Babe is getting a sinking feeling in his stomach and begins to regret he ever asked, he says: “If you want to.”

Babe can feel the smile slowly spread over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

“Then I guess we are.” And the small smile he gets in return feels like the best thing to happen to him in quite a while.


End file.
